Online video is a growing medium. The popularity of online video services reflect this growth. Advertisers see online video as another way to reach their customers. Many advertisers are interested in maximizing the number of actions (e.g., impressions and/or click-throughs) for their advertisements. To achieve this, advertisers make efforts to target advertisements to content, such as videos, that are relevant to their advertisements.
When an advertiser wishes to target advertisements to a video, the advertiser may target advertisements to the video content. For example, if videos are classified into categories, the advertiser can target advertisements to the videos based on the categories.
In some online advertising systems, advertisers pay for their ads through an advertising auction system in which they bid on advertisement placement on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) or a Cost-Per-Mille (e.g., thousand impressions) (CPM) basis. The advertiser typically has a budget to spend on advertising, and the auction can be run between competing advertisers via each bidder's CPC and/or CPM bid given the advertiser's budget, or through a more complex equation of CPC and CPM, such as one that weighs the advertiser's bid by that advertisement's known Click-Thru-Rate (CTR) or other values. In one variation on the system, an advertiser targets an advertisement at a particular content location, web site, or content category, and the advertiser's bid is weighted by an estimated Click Through Rate (eCTR).